The Piri Reis Map: What a 1513 Fragment Really Shows — and What It Doesn't

2026-06-22 · Impossible Objects · 8 min read

The winter light in Istanbul is thin and grey, and in 1929 it fell on crate after crate of manuscripts stacked in the vaulted rooms of Topkapi Palace, where the Ottoman sultans had ruled for close to four centuries. The sultanate had just been abolished, and the palace was being turned into a museum of the young Turkish republic. Halil Edhem Eldem, director of the national museums, had invited a German theologian named Gustav Adolf Deissmann to help survey the library, and Deissmann in turn persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund the preservation of its oldest manuscripts. Somewhere in that dim archive his hand closed on a piece of gazelle skin, torn raggedly down one edge, painted with coastlines, small ships and the spoked wheels of compass roses. He could not read the Ottoman Turkish crowded into its margins. He could see that it was very old, that it was a map, and that the writing kept returning to a name with no obvious business in a Turkish palace: Colombo.

What Deissmann had found was the surviving third of a world map drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, an Ottoman admiral. The fragment measures roughly ninety by sixty-three centimetres. Across it run about a hundred and seventeen place names and some thirty inscriptions, all but one of them written in the Turkish of Piri Reis's day. It is one of the earliest surviving maps to show any part of the Americas. For a document that spent four hundred years folded away in a palace it is remarkably intact, dense with parrots, mountains, ships and the small careful handwriting of a man explaining his own working method.

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